First paragraph:
Parties have a key role to play in any democracy: that of
providing informational short cuts. The need for parties to
play this role is especially critical in new democracies
where politics is in a state of flux that may exhaust
voters' capacity to process information about individual
politicians. Brazil presents an extreme case for the
indispensability of parties because its Open List
Proportional Representation (OLPR) system can present voters
with lists of 60-600 candidates from which they must choose
one. The party system was one of the most problematic realms
of consolidation in the years after the Brazilian military
regime left power. Fernando Collor, the first popularly
elected president of the current democratic period, created
the briefly successful Partido Reconstrução
Nacional (PRN) as a vehicle for his election campaign in
1989 (Hagopian, 1996: xvi-xx). However, he was impeached in
1992 and the party collapsed almost immediately. In the late
1980s, the largest party to emerge from the years of
military regime, the Partido do Movimento Democrático
Brasileiro (PMDB), split in two, with many defectors
following academic (and later president) Fernando Henrique
Cardoso to form a splinter party, the Partido da Social
Democracia Brasileira (PSDB). Cardoso and the PSDB went on
to win the presidency in 1994, several governorships,
including the two largest states, São Paulo and Rio
de Janeiro, and nearly a fifth of the seats in the Chamber
of Deputies. Nevertheless, the original PMDB was undaunted,
and met with success in both gubernatorial and legislative
races, maintaining one of the largest congressional
delegations. Furthermore, in the next two presidential
elections the PMDB supported the PSDB's candidate, begging
the question of how truly separate the parties
were.

Next to Last
Paragraph:
This piece has argued that while Brazil's national party
system looks to be 'settling down' nicely, divergent trends
in state-level party systems, where most voters actually
interact with parties, are potentially quite damaging to
parties' capacity to play their key informational role in
democracy. After considering some potential explanations,
the hypothesis was advanced that state-level party
organizations' choice of clientelistic versus programmatic
linkages could be the best explanation. Proxy data on
clientelism were presented, as well as some analysis
thereof, which gives some confirmation to the hypothesis,
although at rather low confidence levels. These are probably
primarily the result of a maximum N of 27 (the number of
Brazil's federal units), and in several cases even fewer
because of data constraints. Improvement could be made by
collecting full datasets for all states, and also by using
different kinds of data that might serve as better proxies
for clientelism, such as surveys of corruption and its
association with specific parties in specific states, or
state-level measures of 'pork' legislation or public
employment. Another improvement would be better specified
measures of the competition type, as some of the states
could not be classified at all, perhaps including electoral
results from state-legislative elections as well, and
finding a formula by which to amalgamate these with the
congressional, senatorial and gubernatorial electoral
results..